Category: Trump

…suppose you were being questioned by the Truth Demon – a super-powerful being who knows the truth on every topic, and will punish you horribly if you give a wrong answer or fail to answer at all. If you continue to assert a claim when the Truth Demon asks you if it is true, then you do really believe it, really think it is true. But if you give a different answer when under threat of torture by the all-knowing demon, then you don’t really believe the claim.

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A somber and sober New Year’s reflection on the increasing cynicism this last year of chaos and conformity has wrought.

Like the rest of you who remain tethered to glowing screens, this year has left me feeling constantly frayed. And like many others, my view of the internet, with its once attendant optimism for the future, has grown increasingly cynical.

I’ve been busy, of course, but peeling away that inevitable excuse, there’s also this to point to for my reticence in writing.

To write, to really write, is to break momentarily free from all that has come before to forge a pathway into the heart of darkness. To rediscover and lay bare the ancient byways that were already there.

But really, we — I — should have known better. Nothing is ever truly proffered for free. Every time we log into a browser, tap into an app, and affix our gaze onto a screen, our every click and swipe and clack of a key is harvested and mined for every last life drop of data. As William S. Burroughs, a professional junkie who would know, once said:

Beware of whores who say they don’t want money. The hell they don’t. What they mean is that they want more money; much more.

It all seems so banal, at first. But what a Faustian bargain it is. We grow not only reliant upon these ephemeral feeds, but addicted. The declension from creator to consumer occurs so subtly that we can almost convince ourselves that we are still creative gods as we color in prescribed, personalized templates administered to us in a drip line from the inner algorithms of a Forbidden City.

Those who control the data, who can mine them for patterns that will narrow the probabilistic outcomes for any given successive moments of time, grow stronger with every reinvestment of attention that we bestow within their encircled domains.

Yet here I am, freely spilling my branded pixels forth onto this particular platform which will be willingly disseminated via instant post grams in the hope that it may gain a stranger’s fleeting approval. So I keep clicking, and feeding, and posturing.

I — we — must still hope for something redemptive. Some Neo love Jesus transmutation that will imbue the raw bestiality of humanity with some kind of higher purpose and meaning.

But I know, we know, you know

that the greatest of power and riches lies within.

However trite, this is a diamond truth forged by star song. So long as this is kept just beyond immediate attention, we fumble in bonds.

Let 2018 be the year in which you and I and we dig closer to the inner flame for longer periods of time for a greater amount of good.

You can’t have it both ways. Either you are for centralized government regulation (for specific purposes), or you are for little to no government regulation. Whether government regulation should occur at the federal level or state level (or city or county level) is a completely different argument.

By U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Michael Sandberg. [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsHere in the U.S., one of the core tenets of conservative ideology is that the government needs to keep its bureaucratic nose out of individual people’s business. Hence, frequent outcries against federal government “overreach” and rallying calls around “local control.”

Yet there’s some deep tensions that can manifest from this ideology when it’s applied beyond guns and other NIMBYist advocacy. And there’s a hypocrisy that becomes evident when conservatives that espouse such ideology gain power.

To help illuminate what lies behind this anti-government sentiment, let’s first examine an essay published by The Hoover Institution (based on a book of the same name) called “Rugged Individualism: Dead or Alive?”

The essay provides a useful term that underpins these concepts: “rugged individualism.” The term, which apparently was coined by Herbert Hoover, highlights the “frontier spirit” of unregulated American expansionism and capitalism.

Yet even within this very essay, which argues explicitly for “rugged individualism,” look closely at the following passage and how when a cherished cause arises, (in this case, the cause of civics education) an argument for government regulation suddenly appears:

“Civic engagement has become a battle cry in education, which is fine—but it needs to be preceded by civic education. The states need to get busy requiring courses in civic education and schools of education should make sure their graduates understand enough of the content of the American system to teach it effectively.“

Herein lies the tension between rugged individualism and government regulation. This author’s advocacy for “rugged individualism” hinges around the desire for keeping government out of regulating individual choices. But the minute he turns to the failure in education to consistently adhere to a structured and sequential curriculum of knowledge, guess what he suggests? The government needs to require it!

Yet this call for government regulation is able to subvert traditional conservative alarms because he refers this control to state-level government. But this is highly revealing of the problem with such rhetoric. Conservatives, such as the author of this essay, will speak generally of government vs. individual responsibility when it behooves them, until it comes to something specific they want other people to do, whereupon they can then immediately turn to talking about state power, offsetting it against the federal government. As if state rights were synonymous with that of an individual’s. This is clearly fallacious thinking.

You can’t have it both ways. Either you are for centralized government regulation (for specific purposes), or you are for little to no government regulation. Whether government regulation should occur at the federal level or state level (or city or county level) is a completely different argument.

So you can see this problematic thinking playing out whenever there are hardline conservatives in power and issues such as abortion (where’s the ‘rugged individualism’ for women, huh?), LGBTQ rights, or immigration enforcement come up for political posturing.

For example, there’s been some attention on Texas right now, where extremely hardline conservatives control the state and are seeking to control the progressive enclave of Austin.

“Matthew Walter, president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, an organization of Republican state officials, said preemption laws are coming up more and more because of political losses by Democrats at the state and federal levels.

Cities ‘seem to be sort of the last vanguard of Democratic and progressive ideals, which at this point continue to move leftward toward . . . a more socialist vision,’ Walter said. Because cities and counties derive their power from the states, states are within their rights to rein in rogue local governments, he said.”

States certainly are within their rights, because that’s what the concept of a centralized and hierarchical government is about. But follow that logic all the way up. That means the federal government is within its rights to reign in rogue state governments. Though Walter’s logic also begs the question of why it would be the duty of state government to regulate anyone else’s “progressive ideals” or vision.

Abbot, the Upshot states, “has been a vocal advocate for state laws that he says are necessary to protect individual liberty from local government overreach. When cities overstep their bounds, he said this year, they ‘should pay the price for it.’”

So . . . state government can regulate local government when local government regulates individuals (in ways your party doesn’t agree with).

Think about that for a minute. State government, according to this logic, is necessary to prevent local government overreach. So does that mean a state government can never overreach? Only federal or local governments can overreach? But whatever happened to the idea of “local control” here?

Or does this really just mean that any government only “overreaches” when it legislates something that your base doesn’t agree with? And that any other legislation–like, oh, I don’t know, preventing women from getting an abortion, let’s say, which regulates an individual’s choices–is just fine and dandy. Is this really logical? Only in the political pandering sense of logic. i.e. hypocrisy.

Here’s another quote from a Republican trying to justify state government control over local control:

“We’re the United States of America. We are not the United Towns of Florida. We’re not the United Counties of Florida,” said Randy Fine, a Republican state representative. . .

. . . “The state is the nexus of government in this country. The states created the federal government, and the states created local government.”

Well, thanks for the history lesson, Mr. Fine. Except there’s this thing called the U.S. Constitution which superseded the Articles of Confederation. And arguably, it was local governments that led to states, not the other way around.

Maybe the problem here is that when conservatives argue about the essential importance of “local control,” they rarely define what exactly “local” really means. Because when push comes to shove, they suddenly revert to “state’s rights.” But that sure sounds like a big stretch to me, to correlate a “local” government with a state government.

Conservatives themselves do butt heads over such things. This can be viewed most recently in arguments over public education and charter schools. Some conservative supporters of charter schools are not supporters of the laissez faire approach, but rather point to the evidence that charters are most effective (in terms of test scores, at least) when they are more strictly regulated by states. Others, such as in a new collection of essays on the topic, Charting a New Course, deride such “system-centered reformers” and argue that charters are over-regulated and choices should be left up to the parents and the free market.

Well, I’ll leave such internecine debates to conservatives themselves to hash out. In the meantime, I’m going to listen to (or read) anyone who brings up government overreach or local control with great skepticism.

“the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.”

“A couple of years ago, reporting from San Francisco, I noted an erosion of public meaning which seemed to getting in the way of civic progress. A key cause, I suggested at the time, was technology’s filtering effects—the way that, as we lived more of our lives in a personal bespoke, we lost touch with the common ground, and the common language, that made meaningful public work possible. Perhaps filtering effects are at play, but nothing I’ve seen since has changed my mind. The most dangerous intellectual spectre today seems not to be lack of information but the absence of a common information sphere in which to share it across boundaries of belief.”

Thomas critiques the movement on both left and the right during this election towards a simplistic, “folk theory” of democracy, in which political leaders are completely beholden to populist will. And what is lost, he argues, is the educative function of representative leadership.

Obscured by the turn to populist democracy is any sense that representatives and political parties play an important role in educating and shaping the public mind, or that democracy depends on political leadership to refine, channel, and elevate popular wants. This is curious because it is so at odds with the understanding of liberal democracy that underlies our Constitution, an understanding that is increasingly under pressure. It is particularly curious that Republicans, who not only purport to revere America’s Constitution but have made a habit of insisting that it is being undermined, have embraced a populist view of democracy.

As a recourse, Thomas turns to Madison’s vision of a representative democracy. We’ve reviewed Federalist #10 before, examining the distinction that Madison makes between a direct democracy and a representative democracy (in fact, it’s one of the more popular posts on this blog).

Our political institutions were crafted to be responsive to the people over time, but also to put space between the people and their representatives. Self-government also required self-restraint. This would allow the often inchoate and disparate views of the public to be formed by way of the political process.

. . . Republican and democratic government were both forms of popular government rooted in the authority of the people, but Madison favored a republic to “pure” democracy precisely because of its educative and enlightening ambitions.

A populist democracy requires a populace deeply knowledgeable about policy and politics. This is not a realistic expectation to hold about the general populace.

Ordinary citizens are busy with private life and obligations closer to home. Self-government requires them to be generally informed and able to make judgments about their representatives, but we cannot expect them to be experts on the range of issues they are now asked to speak to during elections.

Yet increasingly, voters are asked, such as on ballot propositions in California, to make complex policy decisions. And politicians, on the other hand, increasingly bow to the “will” of a populace calling for untenable extremes. As Thomas states, “[Politics] requires compromise.”

But what happens when political leaders and the parties themselves seem to be composed of the “less inquiring”? What happens when our leadership class abdicates the educative role that Madison envisioned?

What happens is what we’ve seen from the Republican party all throughout Obama’s presidency: a complete unwillingness to compromise in order to govern more effectively. Which resulted in the “abuse” of executive power that conservatives so loathed the Obama administration for.

Insistence on political principle is an important feature of democratic politics, but it must be coupled with a recognition that persuading others and building coalitions is a crucial part of politics and essential to the creation of viable public policy.

. . . Achieving numerous ends requires a recognition that the difficult business of politics is often about finding the right balance between competing goals, given limited resources.

Thomas concludes his essay by stating, “Educating the public mind, and preparing it for democratic self-government, is more important than ever.” I’m afraid that Trump’s presidency will be guidance precisely on how NOT to govern. The extreme contrast to Obama’s measured, dignified, and intelligent administration will be illustrative indeed.